The Predicament

Precious Broadband, you are a proper noun. How I have missed you.

First they said the Xbox was failing, now it’s Nintendo, after that it will be the Xbox again, and then after that maybe more Nintendo. It’s just what analysts do, they analyze things and make charts. Since the N64, I’ve thought of Nintendo’s home consoles the same way I think of Pocket Rockers. Do you remember those? I’m not trying to say they are for girls. They’re both proprietary formats that exist for little other reason than to be proprietary. I’ll never begrudge Nintendo the right to make their little vanity devices, so long as their first party games continue to exhibit that Must Play perfectionism.

Just before we moved I was a ten-round-a-day Road to Rome man, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m looking forward to getting back in. God damn. The daring raids, the lucky shots. I even enjoy the old maps more now, and the expansion doesn’t do shit to those. I’d heard that the single player was actually pretty fun, and that is a fucking lie, unless a lobster falls out of the special seafood freezer you keep above your monitor and hits the “single player” button you have no excuse being in there. Then again, offline may be the only time you can actually get to an airplane. We’re sort of waiting on Gabe’s new machine at the moment - I told him I would build him one, but he seems to like those guys - and he’s going to get this game on there even if I have to buy it for him, install it myself, sit him down in the chair, and wag a stern finger at the screen. Maybe he can take a break from getting his ass kicked in online fighters, and come get his ass kicked with us in another game.

Though I’d never publicly lamented it, I am sort of sad that the planned console version of Battlefield 1942 was cancelled. It’s an excellent PC game, one of the best I can recall, but I believe it could really make its mark in that context. Throw in a little built-in voice, a little real-time lip syncing, it would be like Team Fortress 2, if Team Fortress 2 were not wholly mythological!

I’m going to turn up the dork for a moment.

It was agony to me, but the place I used to live had no storage to speak of and many of my prized obsessions had to remain at my grandparents’ house. I have them all back now: virtually every world and boxed set from TSR’s Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons Heyday, a king’s library of geek literature. You may be wondering if I have every Goddamn thing ever produced for the Planescape campaign setting, including a few books of rather middling fiction. Oh, you may be assured that I do, sir!